She was a doctor’s daughter from the backwoods of Mississippi. And she, like myself, had never been recommended a book or forbidden a book. She had a natural curiosity about everything. She never married, but she was not like some of the mean-natured frustrated American old maids. She was like some of those English spinsters—just a jolly soul interested in flowers, wildlife, books, everything on earth. She would say, “Of course, I don’t really expect you children to understand much of Chaucer’s language, even though they’ve modernized it here. You have to remember that French and English were very close. And speaking of French, I want to play an Edith Piaf song for you all.” She’d wind up the phonograph, and here comes Edith Piaf in English class. That was our Chaucer lesson. But of course, you think, Well, Chaucer. I’m going to look up that damn Chaucer, you know. She would say, “That reminds me, there’s a book by Jules Renard, in French. You must notice this drawing by Degas. Did you see the color of the sycamore leaves this morning?”
The minute she saw that somebody was perking up at something and not doing the usual head-on-the-elbow, she would give something special to that person. Or call them up afterward and say, “Have you read this?” On her famous little three-by-fives in this clear little hand she’d write down the name of some strange book. On the blackboard she was always writing titles and names, and she’d say, “Oh, there’s a book that hasn’t yet achieved the status of classic, but the young men should perhaps read it.” Then she’d say, “Now there’s a poet who explains a lot about the female mind. And, oh, I don’t imagine boys would enjoy it, but the girls should all read Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale.” Of course, the boys couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Sometimes she’d come in and sit at her desk and say, “I’m rereading the unfashionable poets. None of these are in the textbook, but you can be sure that when they make a new textbook in ten years’ time, what is there now will be out. Some of these will be in.” She had this casual way of indicating the vast world of ideas we might investigate.
Everybody who studied with her loved her, because she had this absolute radar. She understood unruly Southern boys going through the first ghastly phase of adolescence, not certain whether they were men or boys, men or children. She had this wonderful way of dealing with people. I can remember her saying, “Now Herbert, you look real tired today. Why don’t you just go sit in that empty seat in the back row and put your head down on the desk.” Herbert would have been up all night doing God knows what, and you could see it in his face. She could tell at a glance when girls were having what we used to call their first moments of femininity. She never would say anything outright in class. God, no. But she would say, “Now, Mabel Ann, come here.” Mabel Ann would come. And she’d say, “Mabel Ann, would you take this to the principal’s office?” And she would give her a note which said “You just sit down in the waiting room at the principal’s office until you feel better.” The real proof is that some of those unruly Southern boys who sat in the back and hated English class have come forward and written to her years later from remote places saying, “I remember your class. And I remember what you said about blah, blah, blah. I remember how you made us read blah, blah, blah. I just wanted to say that I remember your class and appreciate it.” She gets letters like that constantly from all over the world. When I think of her, I think of windows, doors, screens, shutters, all flying open, and crosscurrents carrying me away.
But except for her class, I failed everything. I just didn’t study. And I couldn’t take what was called physical education. I just couldn’t take it. I loathed basketball and football and baseball. I loathed all that. The very idea. I didn’t like balls coming toward me, and the stench of those shoes was too much. Those sneakers smelled so bad. It wasn’t the smell of sweat. If you live around horses and dogs and all that, a little human sweat doesn’t do a thing to you. But there was something nasty about those woolen socks inside those Keds, that kind of infinitely souring, sweaty foot in sweaty Keds. And the Keds keep that stink. Stinky feet in stinky socks in stinky Keds—I just couldn’t do it. So after I went to the gym twice and smelled those Keds, I sat under the stairs during physical education. They had monitors in the halls then. You had to have a pass card to be roaming in the corridors between classes. So I stole a big monitor’s chair with a wide arm to write on and put it under those stairs. I sat there for three years during gym class and no one caught me. I was a monitor. On a couple of occasions when somebody would come, I would say, “Where are your pass cards?” Of course, I always let them go. “Next time be sure you have your pass card.”
At the end of my senior year, they called me into the principal’s office and said in wonder, “We can’t graduate you. You have not enough credits, and you have never had any physical education.” I got out of high school because I had won a national prize, a state prize, and two local prizes for my drawings and my poems. They said, “Well, you don’t have enough credits, but you’re on the graduation program for all your honors. So we’ll graduate you, but you’ve got to come back this summer and study the Constitution and commercial geography.” That’s how I got my high school diploma.
There was this old guy who fancied himself a professor teaching commercial geography. It was the principal products of the Nile Valley. What is the source of rubber? How many cubic yards of raw steel does the United States export every year? Things of passionate concern to me. He was one of those teachers who flipped a key ring as he talked. Since I have the poet’s memory where nothing is lost and the right stimulus, the right smell, the right unexpected sound, will bring back two encyclopedias’ worth of recollections, sometimes a certain key ring—not all—it must be a high B-flat—will bring back the chief products of the Nile Valley. Because he did it throughout the class. He’d pick up the key ring and clink, clink, put it down. So for me, commercial geography is a series of key clinks.
*
When I was just out of high school, I went to work painting Mardi Gras floats under Edmond de Celle. His mother was the famous variety actress Alexandra Dagmar, the one who lived with Mr. Gayfer when the peach orchard she bought turned out to be a swamp. He was this wonderful half Belgian, half Danish painter, a professional, who came here as a young man and stayed on to design Mobile’s Mardi Gras parades. The preparation for the parade took a full year; a brief two hours of glory trundling through the downtown streets, then back to the warehouse to be dismantled. The locations of the warehouses were secret, the themes of next year’s parade a dark secret.
Edmond de Celle did the double-O Ms [OOM], the most snobby and the oldest of the parades. And they had their den, as it was called, this corrugated tin warehouse where the parade was built, in the north part of town which was close to the city dump. The dirt track leading to it had this row of houses, these fantasy structures built by the people who “worked” the dump. There was one little house built entirely of Coca-Cola signs. And there were several that had bottle trees, with bottles tied on trees to catch the bad spirits. There were others that had little garden beds edged entirely with Nehi bottles turned upside down.
The warehouse was huge, big enough for the eight wagons which were the emblem float and seven subsequent floats of the parade. The walls were hung with life-size horses, dragons, giants’ heads, urns, arches, wings, and cloud formations which could be used again.
The wooden substructure for the float would take shape over this chicken wire, cunningly bent, stretched, and curved to make the basic forms. Then a long two or three weeks of weaving strips of brown paper through all the chicken wire to give a base for the papier-mâché which came next. A great cauldron bubbled over a pile of pine knots: a vat of flour paste was cooked with cow-hoof glue and bluestone added. The sheets of brown paper were dipped in, wrung out, then smoothed over all the surfaces of the figures. What a stink! Several months of this, then the prime coats of paint were brushed on. This was made up as we used it, of dry powdered pigment, water, boiling cow-hoof glue, and was even stinkier than the paste. Maestro de Celle painted all the details and important bits. In spite of the Depression, pounds of Dutch gold leaf were used on the floats. Sometimes crowns and thrones or certain details would be covered flatly, but usually the squares of gold leaf were applied onto a dab of glue so that the four corners were left fluttering. Mules drew all the floats then. When the float moved down the street, the hundreds of moving scraps of gold leaf caught the light of the torches, and the float seemed literally to burn. Everything remembered from childhood always seems grander and better, but my, when one looked down Government Street and saw the rose red glow on the overhanging oaks and heard those distant drums, it was very exciting indeed. For me, just to see the bare platforms suddenly covered with strange, mysterious-looking skeletons of chicken wire molded in the beginning of something, then weeks of papier-mâché, dipping brown paper into flour paste, molded in on the wire, then the grand coat, then the gold leaf, then the float, then the parade: it was a thrill.
Anything to Avoid a Nice Christian Household
The summer I graduated from high school, Mr. Gayfer died of a heart attack or stroke, very unexpectedly. Arrangements had been made, we thought, for me to go to LSU and be under a sort of protectorship of Robert Penn Warren, who taught down there. But Mr. Gayfer never got around to making a will. So one morning I woke up and had no home, no family, no guardian, and that’s when these social workers wanted to put me in a nice Christian household. When Mr. Gayfer died, everybody said, “Poor little Eugene, poor little Eugene, what will we do with poor little Eugene?” All these people were saying I must be put in a nice Christian household, and I heard them. I got to the social services thing downtown, and I said, “Look, I’ve got to find out how to get into the Civilian Conservation Corps.” The lady said, “Usually it is for boys who have gotten into trouble and are sent away from home.” So in a sense, I ran away and joined it. Anything to avoid being placed in a nice Christian household.
The one I joined was a forestry camp in Richton, Mississippi. I was the only non-reform school boy in my group of fifty. They had all either tumbled some farmgirl down in the hay or stolen from the collection plate in church. Most of them were illiterate, totally. They were from the backwoods of the backwoods, where they sit playing poker all day on the front porch and then finally the mama appears at the front door and says, “You varmints, get out of here and get me some meat. There ain’t no meat in this house. Go on. Git.” Their rifles are leaning in the corner of the house, and they would get their rifles, get the shells, and say, “Oh, Ma, shut up.” They go out in the woods and get Mama some meat, then go back to playing poker. Then they might say, “Is Joe tending the still today? Who’s tending the still?” Back in the back even farther back—moonshine.
I was terrified of those boys at first. There was a bully, of course. It was the huge feeble-minded boy who saw right away that I was Something Else. I sized him up. I realized they were looking askance at me because they found out the first day I could read and write. So I didn’t say anything to anybody at all. On the third night, I climbed on top of my locker and swung by my knees from a beam in the ceiling. They stopped everything. There was a silence. I just swung by my knees, and then I got down, got into bed, and went to sleep. The next night when it was time to put the lights out, I did it again.
There was this one really very pleasant guy who had a good sense of humor. He was one of those whose eyes made wrinkles when he laughed. He said to me, “Walter, are you going to tell us what you’re doing?” I said, “I do this every night before I go to bed. It gets the cobwebs out of my brain.” Then this boy said, “I told you he weren’t like nobody else.” Then they became friendly. Again it was that respect for the monkey. You don’t know what the monkey is going to do. He moves too fast and can strangle you with his strange tail if you’re too mean to him.
They fascinated me because they had a body of weather lore and weather knowledge, as the illiterate do, that we don’t have. They would look at the sky and say, “About three o’clock this afternoon, rain, I reckon, coming from the north.” They would look at a patch of woods and say, “Well, it looks like rabbits been in there this morning early.” And they would say, “Deer in there, and deer in there.” I couldn’t see anything at all, but they could see a series of twigs or a series of trampled leaves on the ground, and they knew. They loved when it rained because they could stay in the barracks and play poker rather than go out and plant trees. They had a rain god named Raymond, and they would look at the sky and say, “Come on down, Raymond!” Those backwoods boys also had some stanzas of “The Jolly Tinker” that had never been recorded before. It’s a folk song that came from Elizabethan England to the mountains of Virginia, then to the mountains of Carolina, then to north Georgia, then to north Alabama, then to Mississippi. And it’s a good song.
There was a Jolly Tinker,
He came from France,
All he wanted to do was fiddle, fuck, and dance,
With his long lean liver flopper, kidney whopper, belly rubber
Long lean baby maker hanging to his knees.
And it goes on for three hundred stanzas.
The Tinker he died, he went to Hell,
Swore to fuck the devil if he didn’t treat him well,
With his long lean liver flopper, kidney whopper, belly rubber
Long lean baby maker hanging to his knees.
There was an old lady, age of ninety-three,
Said let the Jolly Tinker get to me!
I was able to sit down with Alan Lomax in Paris and thrill him with some stanzas of “The Jolly Tinker” he had never heard. His father was the great expert on American folk songs who did all the collections in the thirties and forties that are now in the Library of Congress. This was Alan Lomax the son, who was continuing Daddy’s work. I had some stanzas of “The Jolly Tinker” they didn’t have because I had been in the CCC camp in Mississippi. This was 1953 in Paris. We sat at the Café de Tournon, and afterwards Alan Lomax said, “Isn’t it wonderful? Thinking of the troubadours, the tradition of French chanson— Isn’t it wonderful to be sitting here singing ‘The Jolly Tinker’ in Paris?”